You need to write some content, and have a place on the net to put it. Your local internet provider (ISP) will probably have a space reserved for you to put your web pages on their system. Talk to them about the details.
Specific information on how to write and publish web pages is beyond the scope of this FAQ. For more information on this, start by reading the results of this search.
There is no 'club' to join if you have a DSM-oriented web page. However, you can do a few things to increase your visibility. One is to submit your site to search engines such as Yahoo! and Google. Another is to join the DSM Webring.
If you want your site to become associated with www.dsm.org, you may want to get a dsm.org domain name address. See below for details.
The Last Word: Forget about getting a dsm.org address - it's a miracle the existing ones still work. There is no central club any more.
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Email Todd Day and ask him. Nicely. Use 'please' and 'thank you'. Be patient for a response, he's a very busy guy.
Note: as of 2002, Todd is no longer active in the DSM community. Therefore it is fair to assume that any requests for new dsm.org addresses will be ignored.
The Last Word: Forget about getting a dsm.org address by now.
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Courtesy of Todd Day, dsm.org sites can now be searched via the ht://Dig search engine located at www.dsm.org. This allows you to be able to search your site without having your own server handy, and is the method this site uses.
Note: as of 2002, the dsm.org search engine no longer functions. It was intermittently available for a while but now seems to be gone forever. Try using Google to implement a local search on your site.
For your reference, here is the relevant information posted by Todd regarding the now-defunct dsm.org search engine. It has been edited for presentation only.
"I finally got the entire search engine business up and running. Now all the individual selections aside from the membership database are working. This new archiver, ht://Dig, is pretty damn cool. It has a lot of advantages over the old one I was running, not the least of which is ease of setup and customization. It currently is a bit slower than the old Microsoft searcher, and I think that is for a couple of reasons. One, it is running on a 100MHz Pentium (which I will be upgrading in a couple weeks, I think), and two, it is being written by a few people for free. The nice thing is that they do continue to work on it.
Two problems I've found - it doesn't restrict the amount of hits returned (typing in DSM returns over 5000 - please don't do this, though, it thrashes the machine pretty hard). Secondly, it doesn't support phrase searching or the NEAR keyword yet. But these should be added soon. Of course, the biggest attraction with it is that I can index all the club sites, which the Microsoft indexer wouldn't do.
I've gotten tired of having to redo the way I have the searching set up every time I have to change some small thing. So I made a script that should be "guaranteed" to do the correct thing no matter what I change. It will take a "set in stone" set of arguments, grok them to work with whatever I have running at the time, and redirect your browser there. The script is located at
http://www.dsm.org/search.epl
It takes the following arguments
search={your search}
type={local|sites|regionals|digest|recent|members|author}
where
So, let's generate a search. Let's look for "ecu codes" on the technical sites. My script will accept either POST or GET, doesn't matter, but I'll use GET format here as it makes nice URLs.
http://www.dsm.org/search.epl?type=sites&search=ecu%20codes
Note that the space was escaped to a hexadecimal number. Spaces, ampersands, percent signs, and equal signs must all be escaped for this to work in GET format. This is just a fact of life with URLs and you've probably seen this form before.
Since it wasn't specified, the searcher defaulted to "and" mode, which means all words must be in a document for it to return a match. It will only return documents that contain both ecu and codes. This search only brought back 6 matches. That's probably 'cause we used the plural form of "codes". Let's try
http://www.dsm.org/search.epl?type=sites&search=ecu%20code*
A wildcard search. This brings back 56 matches, much better. Something tells me I need to enable the "common suffix" feature. That feature, I think, would have taken care of this plural problem for me. I'll do that as soon as I get a faster machine.
I noticed a lot of www.dsm.org action in those replies. Let's say I want to get rid of thos for some reason, and only want to look at the external sites. So we will exclude www.dsm.org.
http://www.dsm.org/search.epl?type=sites&exclude=http://www.dsm.org&search=e cu%2 0code*
This returns only three pages, and they are all offsite, as expected.
Now, let's say we are interested in all the pages covering timing belts on the VFAQ site. We will restrict it to the www.vfaq.com domain.
http://www.dsm.org/search.epl?type=sites&restrict=http://www.vfaq.com&search =tim ing%20belt*
This returns 16 answers, and they are all indeed on the VFAQ site.
So, do you get this yet? With the proper [form] commands, you can use *my* engine to search *your* site!
(Keep in mind you have to use "real" URLs that aren't redirected - you cannot use, socal.dsm.org, for example.)
The coolness doesn't end there, though. Going back to the results from the VFAQ example, click on the third entry. Except click on the "hilite" button instead of the direct URL. Note that the words "timing belt" are highlighted throughout the document without disturbing the integrity of the document itself!
One of the things I hate about all of the search engines on the Internet is that you always get back a huge page and are forced to look through the whole thing or conduct a text search just to find what you are really looking for. That is why I put the hit highlighter on the archives quite some time ago. It makes finding what you are looking for a lot easier. So I decided to see if the same could be done for the club documents, since I was going to be indexing them all anyway. So what my script does is, if it can't find the document locally, it opens up an HTTP session to grab the document. I then insert a [base href] into it so that all the relative links on the page will still work. I also add a single line to the top saying what the original URL was (my script URL is all that shows up in the browser Location bar because the "hilite" button works on a POST operation) as well as a link directly to it. This helps to defeat someone trying to make a shortcut to a hit-highlighted page. As far as I can tell, this whole operation works pretty smoothly. As long as I don't encounter a page that uses an offset [base href] (and who does that?) I think my algorithm will work pretty good.
Where it kinda falls down is on dark pages. Go to the main club page and enter a search for "ecu codes" on the "technical sites". Select "hilite" on the first one (should be code.html). It highlights them, alright, but not quite as you'd like.
Actually, I'll take this as a cue to speak about printability. This particular page is a very good and very valuable page. However, because it uses white, it will not print. At least not with Netscape 4.5. I just tried it and all I got was the table and the diagram. The only way to get it to print is to change your settings in the browser to override the choice of colors, and then print it, which is a pain. I know we all strive to have a cool look, and I think the author of this page picked a good color choice for the net. It looks nice on my monitor. But printing is the killer. Printing is very important for all the documents we create for Club DSM members.
Just tried it with Internet Exploder 4.01, and I was able to produce copy. It was kinda faint, though, but readable. Looks like they've been working on this problem. It still didn't come out as crisp as it should have, though.
BTW, to make printing work universally, you are stuck using black for the text. Any other color dithers a bit on the laser printer. You can pretty much pick any color or design for the background as that seems to be universally ignored by the browsers when they print. At least with the 4.x series.
-todd-"
The Last Word: Just put Google in on your site.
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Go to http://redir.dsm.org/change=sitename.dsm.org, where "sitename" is the address for your site. You will need to know your password.
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Maintained by Sean Costall. Changes and suggestions are welcomed! If you have any information on the answers to any of these questions or wish additional questions, please mail me.
This page is an extension of Club DSM .